The fiscal crisis in Washington is not simply a threat to economic and government stability, it is a premeditated scheme to carve out a new constitutional structure that gives the Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires the power to void the democratic process, writes Robert Parry.

THE KOCH BROTHERS and other right-wing billionaires who provoked the government shutdown and now are angling for an even more devastating credit default see themselves as the people who deserve to rule the United States without interference from lesser citizens — especially those with darker-coloured skin.

Their “masters of the universe” world view is that they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies were the ones who “built America” and, thus, it’s their right to tear down the remarkable edifice of U.S. law, politics and economics created over the past two-plus centuries if the country’s less-deserving inhabitants insist on raising taxes on the rich to fund programs benefiting the poor and the middle class.

That is what we’re watching now — what might be called the Koch Brothers’ ‘Samson Option’; pulling down the temple to destroy their enemies, even if doing so is also destructive to them and their fortunes.

Charles and David Koch and other right-wing billionaires and near-billionaires are blind with anger after wasting millions of dollars on Mitt Romney, Karl Rove and the Republican Party in a failed attempt to defeat Barack Obama, the Democrats and healthcare reform. These were the guys who smirked knowingly when Romney sneered at “the 47 per cent” of Americans who receive some government help; they got snappish when Obama called them “fat cats”; they demanded the honorific title of “job creators”

read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/international/the-u-s-shutdown-and-the-koch-brothers-samson-option/

Of course these sharks can only operate when supported with a complicit media, especially that of Mr Murdoch...